One man told me about a negotiation he had in the apparent safety of his own office. Even when he was on his best behavior-say, dealing with a white executive at one of the major entertainment companies-menace hung heavy in the air. A mammoth, three-hundred-and-fifteen-pound man, Knight has a substantial criminal record, replete with violent acts. It is said that he forced a black music executive at a rival company to strip in the men’s room and then made him walk naked through his company’s offices. Intimidation was Suge Knight’s stock-in-trade. They would look at you, staring right through you No words would have to be said.” were gangsters just out of the penitentiary. So you have to figure, These guys have guns, and it’s a long run to the front door, and there’s security at the front door that may try to stop you, even if you get there. . . . “They have a checklist of people who can go in with guns. music business who worked with Tupac told me. “I have not been to one other studio to this day where you have to be searched before you get in,” a veteran of the L.A.
A guard holding a metal detector stood at the front door of the Death Row studio. Knight’s office in Los Angeles was decorated in red, the color of the Bloods, one of the city’s principal gangs. It was nothing for Knight to hand over a stack of hundred-dollar bills to Tupac for a weekend’s expenses. It had become increasingly clear that there was a steep penalty to pay for having thrown in with Suge Knight.Įven for the rough-edged music industry, which has historically been prone to excess and to connections with criminal elements, Death Row was a remarkable place. Tupac had made three earlier albums, but they had never reached the stratosphere of “quintuple platinum.” Still, the days preceding his murder were anything but halcyon for him. The first album Tupac made for Death Row, “All Eyez on Me,” which was released in early 1996, sold over five million units. The company earned seventy-five million dollars in revenues last year. Death Row, the leading purveyor of West Coast “gangsta rap,” is a music-business phenomenon. 750 sedan driven by Marion (Suge) Knight, the head of Death Row Records.
When twenty-five-year-old Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in Las Vegas last fall, he was riding in the passenger seat of a B.M.W.
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